All my life I have been interested in politics. I don't mean curious, I mean taking an interest because I have an interest in how my life is affected by political decisions and policies. My father and mother were passionately Labour, hard to be otherwise as farm workers in rural Ayrshire. From them I learned the importance of co-operation in working towards a better life for everyone; mum did all her shopping at the Co-operative, an institution founded on values and ideals close to the heart of working folk. From them I also learned the generosity and sheer hard work of those who don't have much, but who have learned how to share, support and above all respect the dignity of people irrespective of income, possessions, address or social background.
I still remember when I was about 6 years of age, the farmer regularly came down to our house at Saturday around lunch time and handed my dad his wages, peeled from a large wad of banknotes. I wondered why he had so much, and my dad who worked so hard had so little. Call it the politics of envy, but that was the beginning of a deep questioning that would later find ethical, theological and political concepts that enabled that question to be asked with deeper intent and intellectual passion.
By the time I left school aged 15 and was working in a brickworks, I was elected a shop steward for the TGWU, a role I fulfilled with teenage over-seriousness but supported by a labour workforce of around 50 rough and ready men whose aims in life seemed no higher or further than the next wage packet. My appointment as a local Union Rep was due to my ability to argue, listen and argue better. While there I studied for my O Levels and Highers and made a late entry into University at age 20. The years studying Moral Philosophy, Scottish History and Social Administration were formative in ways that have permanently set my inner compass towards the magnetic North of social justice and ethical politics (not an oxymoron).
Teachers such as Bob Holman and Kay Carmichael taught me the important lesson of impatience. When it comes to issues of care for the poor, looking out for and speaking up for the vulnerable, being open and welcoming to other people who are human as I am, wanting the best for their families as I do, looking for a chance to live in a fairer and safer society, then patience can easily become indifference. In an unjust world passivity is collusion with a system set up in structures that do not allow for the flourishing of each human person. Long before privatisation of the NHS became such a controversial political debate, and long before benefit sanctions, Holman and Carmichael were out there arguing and gathering evidence to demonstrate the realities of poverty, the necessity of a compassionate benefits system and the absolute duty of Government to lift children out of the poverty trap, and all the social disadvantages that flow from early deprivations.
And so as a recently converted follower of Jesus, of the limited and narrow evangelicalism of the early 1970's and central Lanarkshire, I was confronted by two lecturers who sounded more like Amos and Isaiah than any preachers I had so far heard on a Sunday. Holman's faith was never overt in class, but we knew he lived in Easterhouse, helped people find their way thropugh the Social Security maze, was a powerful advocate and eloquent and not easily intimidated voice for the poor who lived all around him on that housing estate. He taught me that following Jesus is about justice, righteousness, compassion, generosity, moral imagination, and though the phrase only came later, speaking truth to power.
Carmichael took us through the politics of poverty, the economics of welfare, the psychology of selfishness, the sociology of power, and made an unforgettable impression when she went incognito as a homeless woman to test the responses of the Social Secutity system in the east end of Glasgow. The resulting TV documentary was damning, exposing the lack of respect, evident indifference, bureaucratic obstructiveness and pervasive lack of hopefulness and helpfulness in a system failing those for whom it was created.
So no wonder I am pondering the results of the Election. I have deep questions about a population that affirms the policies of these past 5 years. Not that the years before were perfect or without that far more telling deficit, in ethical and morally principled politics. But the health of the NHS, the compassionate provision for the poor and the vulnerable, the social justice imperative that seeks to ensure a basic social security as a right – these are now principles of social organisation that for me are ethical, political and more importantly theological. And they are not prominent in the actualities and realities of what is actually happening.
Which brings me to the current status quo. The new god on the block called Austerity, accompanied by its demanding consort Deficit Reduction, is to be challenged as to its veracity, legitimacy and efficacy. Like the false Gods in Isaiah 46, Bel and Nebo, they are gods who have to be carried around, carted as burdens and hindrances. Isaiah proclaims a contrast – we can be the people who carry our Gods, or trust the God who carries his people. And don't spiritualise that into an apolitical spirituality. Isaiah was talking about the economy, the monarchy, the temple, the city and its courts and markets – these would come under the judgement of God. Part of my pondering concerns the nature and the timing of God's judgement on societies in our time which behave in ways mirrored in Isaiah, Micah and Amos – the trampling of the poor, the selling of people's liveliehoods for the price of a pair of trainers, neglecting the care of the widow (for which read immigrant, asylum seeker, benefit sanctioned single mother) appropriating land and goods into the hands of fewer and fewer. Is that a naive Hermeneutic? Perhaps. But perhaps not. Before deciding read Matthew 25. 31-46.
